Flying Between Pages

/ Organikos / Leave a comment
birdsong

“There is no such thing as a stooped or a graceless bird”, writes Krishnan. PHOTO: Scroll

 

“Chugging out of New Delhi Railway Station on an early morning train, I’ve often amused myself by looking out for the “telefauna,” or birds perched on telegraph wires.” Bird lovers on here, there’s a new word for you right there. Of Birds and Birdsong, penned by Indian writer Krishna, is all at once a journal and a tribute. To him, it’s a record of winged creatures sighted around, while to his reader the names of these beauties bring to heart a familiar nostalgia.

Continue reading →

Short Essay On The Commons

/ Crist Inman / Leave a comment
160125_r27591-320

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTOPH NIEMANN

Several times since 2011 I have referenced my doctoral dissertation, which addressed the “tragedy of the commons,” in these pages. Seth, during his study on the history of environmentalism movements, has also posted on this concept. Now, , excellent writer of one page essays explaining complex economic issues, takes a recent odd news item and helps us understand the role of government in regulating the use of the commons:

Ammon Bundy, the leader of the armed militia that stormed the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, in Oregon, has a simple solution for fixing the economy of the West: get the federal government out of the way. His group’s chief demand is that the federal government hand over all of Malheur to local control. The ultimate goal, he says, is “to get the logger back to logging, to get the rancher back to ranching, to get the miner back to mining.” Bundy’s tactics make him easy to dismiss as a kook, but his ideology is squarely in the mainstream of Western conservatism, with its hostility to government ownership, skepticism about environmental rules, and conviction that individual enterprise is being strangled by government regulations. Continue reading →

Footstep by Footstep

/ Organikos / 1 Comment
soccer

This solar-powered football pitch in Lagos also uses kinetic energy generated by footballers playing. PHOTO: Edelman PR

There’s a host of ingenious solar projects impacting the developing world. Energy’s role in political, social, and economic development is being highlighted more than before and being energy-smart is the blueprint to a sustainable future. Clean energy is the way forward. And Lagos has an example. In the name of soccer.

Continue reading →

Sifting Through Food Memories

/ Organikos / Leave a comment
Dabbawala,the lifeline of Mumbai.

The Indian city of Mumbai is home to the ‘dabbawala’ service wherein boxes of hot lunch make their way from homes to customers’ offices.   PHOTO: Satyaki Ghosh

Food memories. Absolutely universal, absolutely distinctive. Across cultures, across borders. United by the emotions they evoke – nostalgia, love, warmth, hope. While travel memories are notched up by the miles, they are bound to feature a food memory or two. Of cultures, smells, people, faces, history.  Jacques Pepin, noted French chef, writes of his in The New York Times:

There is something evanescent, temporary and fragile about food. You make it, it goes, and what remains are memories. But these memories of food are very powerful. My earliest memories of food go back to the time of the Second World War. My mother took me to a farm for the summer school vacation when I was 6 years old with the knowledge that I would be lodged and fed there. I cried after she left and felt sad, but the fermière took me to the barn to milk the cow. That warm, foamy glass of milk is my first true memory of food and shaped the rest of my life.

Continue reading →

Costa Rica’s Tourism Revenue Grows 9% in 2015

/ Seth Inman / Leave a comment
tortuguero-turismo-ict-ingresos-visitas_lncima20160115_0086_5

Tourists travel by boat through the canals of Tortuguero, on the Caribbean coast. Photo by Mayela López for La Nación.

Yesterday, the Costa Rican Tourism Institute reported that revenue from the tourism sector increased in 2015 by 9% over 2014, totaling $2.8 billion for the year. This was partly because the number of actual tourists was up from the previous year: 8% more from the United States, 6.1% more from Europe, and a whopping 29.2% more from China. The total increase in tourists to Costa Rica was by 5.5%, with about 2.6 million people–about half of Costa Rica’s population–visiting the country.

Continue reading →

India’s First Organic State

/ Organikos / 2 Comments
sikkim

Tea plantations on the hillside. PHOTO: Reuters/ Rupak De Chowdhuri

The buzzword is organic. From grocery store shelves to textile designers to travel. At the center of this phenomenon is respect to the land, cognizance of the immense potential of living organisms, acknowledgement of a way of life that has restorative powers. Today, India hears that message loud and clear in the North-eastern hill state of Sikkim.

Continue reading →

Occasional Ideas: Misbehaving With Intent

/ Crist Inman / Leave a comment

Misbehaving.inddOk, while the tiny habits idea was compelling 48 hours ago, and is already having its impact on me, the notion of a daily series posting ideas I have come across may be too ambitious for all concerned. Hence, occasional.

Richard Thaler was a professor when I arrived as a graduate student at Cornell University in 1988. He was, not surprisingly, awesome. But I had no real clue how much so, since it was all relative to my other professors who were also mostly awesome. In recent years it has become more verifiably clear, the scale of his awesomeness measured well by the popularity of his recent books. Also, awesome enough to make a cameo (in the scene at the casino table alongside Selena Gomez) in the great film The Big Short, which I also recommend. But for now, take advantage of this podcast: Continue reading →

Potoos in the Tropics

/ Seth Inman / 2 Comments

Northern PotooA few days ago, Timothy Boucher, a senior conservation geographer at The Nature Conservancy, shared his choice for his personal “Bird of the Year,” the Rufous Potoo, which he saw in Ecuador and was apparently the 5,000th bird to be checked off on his life list. Potoos, related to the frogmouths of southeast Asia and nightjars elsewhere around the world, are members of a highly cryptic, or camouflaged, family that primarily hunts at crepuscular hours and/or throughout the night.

In his blog post, Boucher describes his trip to Ecuador’s Amazon region, which yielded many exotic bird species, as well as the challenges of travel in the tropics. His excitement at hearing–and the next morning, Continue reading →

What The Age Of Humans Looks Like

/ Organikos / Leave a comment
Screen Shot 2016-01-14 at 6.25.23 PM

Soybeans harvested at a farm in Tangara da Serra, in western Brazil. Paulo Whitaker/Reuters

The Science section this week in the New York Times takes a very big picture look at human impact on the earth, putting in terms of geological time:

Welcome to the “Anthropocene” — a new epoch in our planet’s 4.5 billion year history. Thanks to the colossal changes humans have made since the mid-20th century, Earth has now entered a distinct age from the Holocene epoch, which started 11,700 years ago as the ice age thawed. That’s according to an argument made by a team of scientistsfrom the Anthropocene Working Group. Scientists say an epoch ends following an event – like the asteroid that demolished the dinosaurs and ended the late Cretaceous Epoch 66 million years ago – that altered the underlying rock and sedimentary layers so significantly that its remnants can be observed across the globe. In a paper published Thursday in Science, the researchers presented evidence for why they think mankind’s marks over the past 65 years ushered in a new geological time period. Here are a few examples: Continue reading →

Nutmeg – from Table to Design

/ Rosanna Abrachan / 4 Comments
The red covering makes for mace, while the hard nut inside is the nutmeg. PHOTO: Abrachan Pudussery
Nutmeg laid out to dry in the sun. PHOTO: Abrachan Pudussery
On the tree, before it matures and falls to the ground. PHOTO: Abrachan Pudussery

You must have heard the phrase in a nutshell. Well, this post is not exactly that. It’s going to border on being a story in a nutmeg. Yet another tale to add to Kerala’s legacy of having a heart of spices. The nutmeg, though not as glorious as its cousins pepper or cinnamon, is integral for its medicinal, herbal properties and its place in the kitchen.

For me, it’s the embrace that links spending holidays with a grandmother whose heart had nutmeg all over it and a design sensibility at Xandari Harbour. The wispy haired grand lady is long gone, but the wind rustles up her memories among the nutmeg trees. So does a certain corridor at work.

Continue reading →

Architecture With A Purpose

/ Organikos / Leave a comment
13PRITZKER-articleLarge

Alejandro Aravena ELEMENTAL

Breaking news on an architect of the people receiving the most coveted prize in his profession:

Pritzker Prize for Architecture Is Awarded to Alejandro Aravena of Chile

A Chilean architect who has focused his career on building low-cost social housing and reconstructing cities after natural disasters has been named the winner of architecture’s highest prize, the Pritzker. Continue reading →

Idea Of The Day: Tiny Habits

/ Crist Inman / Leave a comment

HBR WordPress

We started the Bird Of The Day series very close to the beginning of this blog in 2011, and it has been our most important ongoing effort here. We get more visitation to those daily posts than to any other series, and in aggregate the series has brought us more new visitors to this site than any other kind of post. We have had a few other series–including “Come to Kerala” which we still write, and Word Of The Day, which we no longer write about–that fit our interests but get little or no traction from our readers.

Today it occurs to me to begin a new stream, largely aimed at our own internal audience of hundreds of people we manage in India, Thailand and Costa Rica.

Ideas. Starting here and now. 17 minutes well spent here with the Harvard Business Review podcast led me to this conclusion. Specifically, about 15 minutes into the podcast of an interview with Matt Mullenweg, founder and CEO of Automattic and co-founder of WordPress, caught my attention as a good idea. Small habits. Listen just for that, but he has plenty of other good ideas as well.

Rain Scents

/ Organikos / 1 Comment
Vivek Prakash/Reuters

Vivek Prakash/Reuters

Smell is one of the most evocative of the five senses, allowing us to relive memories that span our entire lives. Scents from the kitchen make our mouths water. Scents from nature make us long to be outdoors. Considering that on average our bodies consist of 60% water, it isn’t surprising that we’re so attuned to the range of smells associated with H2O.

Many of the RAXA Collective team long for the refreshing monsoon rains in Kerala, never imagining that exhilaration could be captured in a bottle.

Once again we thank The Guardian for this intoxicating story.

Every storm blows in on a scent, or leaves one behind. The metallic zing that can fill the air before a summer thunderstorm is from ozone, a molecule formed from the interaction of electrical discharges—in this case from lightning—with oxygen molecules. Likewise, the familiar, musty odor that rises from streets and storm ponds during a deluge comes from a compound called geosmin. A byproduct of bacteria, geosmin is what gives beets their earthy flavor. Rain also picks up odors from the molecules it meets. So its essence can come off as differently as all the flowers on all the continents—rose-obvious, barely there like a carnation, fleeting as a whiff of orange blossom as your car speeds past the grove. It depends on the type of storm, the part of the world where it falls, and the subjective memory of the nose behind the sniff… Continue reading →

The Sea Inside

/ Amie Inman / 2 Comments

What is it about the sea? The fact that it changes, and the light changes, and the ships change. The feel of being entwined with the ocean? That when we go back to it – whether it is to sail or to watch it – we are going back from whence we came.

– Rosanna Abrachan

The teamwork involved in crafting the videos that help define the guest experience at Xandari Harbour was as satisfying as creating the property itself. Thank you Anoodha and the RAXA Collective – Xandari Harbour teams!

Stay tuned for more!

The Unexpected Manta Rays

/ Jocelyn Toll / 3 Comments

Manta Ray (Manta birostris) at Hin Muang, Thailand. “Neon Fusilier & Manta Ray” by Jon Hanson, via Wikimedia.

We’re no stranger to the benefits of manta rays, especially with contributor Phil Karp’s writings on the subject. The accidental catch of a giant oceanic manta ray (we’re talking about a fish that can weigh up to two tons!) in the northern coast of Peru resulted in the passing of a new law that will significantly help the preservation of this endangered species. On December 31, 2015 the Peruvian government passed a resolution that bans manta fishing and requires the immediate release of mantas that are accidentally caught as “bycatch.”

It’s not unusual for manta rays to get tangled in nets or fishing lines. But rays are also deliberately targeted for their meat and gills plates, which filter out plankton as they swim. The gill plates are considered a culinary delicacy in China, where they’re also used in traditional medicine to reduce toxins, enhance blood circulation, cure cancer, increase breast milk supply, and treat chickenpox and other ailments. There’s no scientific evidence that manta potions are effective in any of these instances.

Continue reading →